Cognitive Dissonance: Balancing Conflicting Beliefs

Sophie Hetche

s.hetch@students.uu.nl

06/12/2024

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Cognitive dissonance = the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes

Figure 1: Example of conflicting beliefs

Development

–> Cognitive Dissonance Theory was developed by Leon Festinger

According to Festinger (1962), people are motivated to reduce the resulting discomfort by either:

a) changing their beliefs,
b) acquiring new information to justify the inconsistency,
c) minimizing the importance of the conflict.

Key Concepts of Cogntive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance Equation

Cognitive dissonance can be expressed with an equation, too:

\[ \begin{aligned} D &= \frac{|B_1 - B_2|}{I} \\ \text{Where:} \\ B_1 &= \text{Belief 1 (e.g., Smoking is harmful)} \\ B_2 &= \text{Belief 2 (e.g., I smoke regularly)} \\ I &= \text{Importance of beliefs (higher value = greater importance)} \\ \end{aligned} \]

Example: Analyzing Cognitive Dissonance Data

The following is an example of how one could perform a linear regression to analyze the relationship between a persons’ dissonance level and their justification behavior:

# run the regression model
model <- lm(dissonance_level ~ justification_behavior + belief_strength, data = cognitive_data)

# Show summary of the regression analysis
summary(model)

Example of Cognitive Dissonance

Example taken from the show F R I E N D S

References

Festinger, L. (1962). Cognitive Dissonance. Scientific American, 207(4), 93–106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24936719